Index of Viridian Notes
Index of previous Viridian Design email list "Notes".

Viridian Design Repository
An archive of entries to Viridian Design contests, maintained by Bob Morris.

Viridian Products
Recommended books for further Viridian reading.

Viridian Issue of "Time Digital" (Jan/Feb 01)
"Our idea for this special section was simple: instead of collecting the usual essays from futurists about how life will be 25 years from now, we wanted to take our readers there, as if it really were January 2026. We also turned this vision into a first-of-its kind broadband magazine. Sterling, who is working on a nonfiction book about future life, was only too happy to be the guest editor for the project: 'Time Digital is a friendly, unpretentious, approachable magazine that would completely shatter people's grip on reality if a time traveler took it back to 1975,' he says."

"The Next 20 Years" Speech (Sep 98)
"Change what people see. Change how they see. That's why I consider this basically an artistic problem. The tools for this are at hand. The eighties were a decade of chips and computation. The nineties -- a decade of lasers, bandwidth, and communication. The next twenty years -- I hope they will be about sensors and perception. Cheap, ubiquitous sensors that make the invisible visible. If you can leverage that new awareness, you can drive the whole culture, you can change people inside and out. Suddenly they will realize that their lives are full of unmet demands."

"Viridian Design" Speech (Oct 98)
"Although it's a convulsively funny thing to do, I am totally in earnest about doing this. You see, the way I figure it, I might as well. I am going to throw away the scabbard of my sword, raise the black flag and burn my bridges. That year, 2000, will be the biggest hole in the status quo since 1977 and 1989. Furthermore, the year 2000 is going to be my personal last hurrah as a brain- burning futurist prophet. I'm in my forties now. The years after 2000 -- the decade of the zeros, whatever the hell we're going to call that -- will be the last time that I will to be able to say things, things that I know are true, and that are obvious to me, that sound weird and inexplicable to the general public."

"Viridian Principles" Speech (Oct 98)
"Our primary advantage over previous generations of artists and graphic designers is that we can see much better than they could. We can manipulate, store, create and analyze graphic imagery with historically unprecedented ease and power. This trend should be recognized, advanced, and artistically exploited. Advances in instrumentation can be used to change the zeitgeist. If carbon dioxide were blood-red, our skies would look ominous indeed."

"The Manifesto of January 3, 2000"
"What is culturally required at the dawn of the new millennium is a genuine avant-garde, in the sense of a cultural elite with an advanced sensibility not yet shared by most people, who are creating a new awareness requiring a new mode of life. The task of this avant-garde is to design a stable and sustainable physical economy in which the wealthy and powerful will prefer to live. Mao suits for the masses are not on the Viridian agenda. Couture is on the agenda. We need a form of Green high fashion so appallingly seductive and glamorous that it can literally save people's lives."